For Christmas, the traditional repeat of my essay, The Night My Father Shot Santa, under "Essays" in this website.  Taken from my book, Beneath the Turning Stars. Merry Christmas!  FK 

​Dec 18 – And the Blind Shall See
 
They say that every cloud has a silver lining, or even better, that each setback is really an opportunity for improvement.  Sure, I’ll take that.  In two days (actually, it will be today by the time this is published) I will have a scalpel dragged across my eyes for something called a ‘cataract’ and I couldn’t be happier.  Yes, it will clear up fading vision, but even better, it may serve to cure me of an incalculable sin.  
 
It is not sacrificing babies to Ba’al or even secretly watching porn as my innocent dog sleeps at my feet.   No – rather, it is an addiction to Amazon Prime TV series, where one can watch four seasons of shows in one week; where one can be absorbed into whatever the writer or writers’ perverse mindset – and, to make it in the moving picture industry it must be perverse – might be.  A few weeks ago it was Fargo.  Now it is a sci-fi series named The Expanse.  It is so evil that it is not bad.  It is actually the best sci-fi film (or screen) drama I have seen in years or even decades.  It is so evilly good that I have given up my solitary night-time habit of reading sacred or philosophical texts, built up over fifteen years, to watch people in costumes pretend to be people they are not and who will never be. 
 
The blessing of the surgery will be that I will not be able to watch it for a few days.  I won’t be able to read either, but still, it is a step in the right direction.  Maybe, just maybe, it will give me that needed moment to pause and repent.  And maybe, just maybe, it will get me out of a vision of the future that confirms the author’s preferences of the present, as sci-fi works generally do.  It is to the latter that blindness might be morally preferable.   Jesus said, “If your eye sins against you, better to pluck it out!” or something similar, which I never thought to take literally, but now… might it bring blessings?
 
The Expanse; the characters are deliciously hard-nosed and in many ways amoral.  Certainly they would not go to Catholic heaven.  Still, it is hard to blame them.  The world(s) of the future has (have) many problems.  The Earth is grotesquely overcrowded with over 40 billion inhabitants, although the rich and powerful still live amazingly well.  Because of this, Mars has been heavily colonized by eager patriotic fanatics whose dream is to flood the planet with water to make it into a new and better Earth.  As the show takes place two or three hundred years in the future, the technology is already there for the enterprise, but all has been put on hold in the struggle to remain politically independent of Earth.  The situation is similar to the early US of A’s relationship with mother England.  Meanwhile, both Earth and Mars have sent people to work the asteroid belt out between Mars and Jupiter for its abundant natural resources, including water for Mars.  Over the hundred and fifty or so years of mining operations in the Belt, the people there have garnered a resentment of their own towards their planetary masters.  These people – who are largely hard-core miners with few niceties to their personalities - have developed their own language and customs and identity.  They are largely run now by the OPA, a subversive and growing group of violent revolutionaries similar in (lack of) subtlety and methods to the old Irish Republican Army (IRA).  Add space ships, betrayal, money and power and mix well. 
 
Then throw in a large dollop of corruption and extraterrestrial life.  A major mining concern has found an alien life form on Phoebe, and has been trying to exploit it to gain control of everyone.  First they must understand it, and to do so, they infect an entire asteroid colony of 100,000 Belters with the “proto molecule.”  They all die grotesquely, or so it seems.  This seriously angers our heroes, a group of losers from Earth and Mars and the Belt who have fortuitously come into possession of an advanced Marian warship.  They become intrinsically involved in everything, and as of last episode, save the Earth from near-annihilation – that is, for now.  To be continued.
 
It is riveting stuff if you are a sci-fi geek, which I obviously am.  I am coming to believe, however, that this is largely a spiritual venue, although if you look for it, you will find the spiritual in nearly every work whether the author or artist intended it or not.  For Expanse, it is clearly intended, which enriches it immeasurably.  The alien entity is looking more and more to be grander than just a hegemonic killer.   But first, there are always the more superficial cultural and moral undertones that sci-fi writers deal with.  Here are a few of the good, the bad and ugly ones slipped into the series:
 
The Ugly: women.  Not so much that they are ugly, as in deformed, but that they are presented to us in the mode of the day: with the same aggressive personalities and physical strengths as men.  Sure, it’s hard to say exactly where sex affects personality, but it does and, as the French say, viva la differance.  In this, only the space-age barroom prostitutes seem to have a feminine side.  Differences of physical strength between the sexes is more certain in reality, but here all the heroines literally pack the same punch as the guys.  It is an insult not only to our intelligence but to our eyes to see a 110 runway model-type knock out a brawny 250 pound weightlifter with her delicate fist, but that’s the way “gender” is supposed to be today, and apparently will be in the future, facts be damned.  Not awful but ugly and telling of a deeper real-life agenda.
 
Which we see in the “bad:” where everyone has sex at will without any consequences, like a fourteen year old boy’s feverish fantasy.  Good for guys on the make, which I suspect fueled a lot of the sexual revolution of the ‘60’s, but terrible for families, which is ultimately terrible for everyone, since we all come from a family one way or the other.  In fact, our prime hero comes from a futuristic hippie commune and is the product, we are told, of a perfect genetic blend of its eight male and eight female members.  All quaintly share in the loving parenthood, except that the “vehicle” that bore him – thank God a natural woman with a womb - seems to care for him the most.  Otherwise, there are few children and even fewer committed couples.  Happy happy. 
 
There is the good.  For one, in this future there is no race consciousness.  I don’t know how they pull it off, but the actors pay no attention to racial differences in any way that I can see.  It is surprisingly refreshing.  It feels like the fetters of politically correct oppression have finally been removed – a true breath of fresh air that tells us just how grating and constant the hue and cry of racial politics are today. 
 
There are also the heroes.  The heroes are self-sacrificing and ultimately overcome their personal failings to do their best for friends, team, and humanity.  Which brings us around to the spiritual:
 
Humanity: there are the three grand factions based on geography, as stated, and a fourth based on corporate greed, but all are seen as limited and rather stupid.  This is where the alien entity comes in.  While they are fighting its possible absorption of humanity, we see that humanity has to change.  We see that it has to become more open to all factions, and that it must act as if all were members of an extended family, above and beyond those of one’s own planet or who share the same selfish agenda.  This bringing together, it is becoming apparent, is what the alien entity intends to do, although we do not know if this will be a spiritual improvement or a Borg-like enslavement to the Prime Director.  But we are being made aware that there is something that is infinitely more beautiful waiting for humanity. 
 
I do not know yet how this will play out.  Perhaps my temporary blindness will ensure that I turn back to my stuffy studies and will never find out (although my sci-fi fanatic wife will certainly see it to the end).   But what we are given to know so far of the Proto Molecule, now that it seems done with killing people, is promising.  “It,” as some of the scientists studying it say, never stops advancing.  It goes on and on to the more complex and the more inclusive.  It never stops learning and perhaps hasn’t really killed anyone at all.  Perhaps it only enriches those it blends with, leaving private destinies intact.  Perhaps, then, is it just as we think God is.
 
God and sci-fi.  We have people mating like dogs and people fighting like dogs trying to mate; we have people unleashed from ancient custom and religion to behave like nothing but their thin selves, unhappy, unfulfilled and furtive amidst the most spectacular of technological achievements.  Kind of like us today.  And we have them searching and, in the fantasy, finding that ‘something extra’ that is beyond mere humanity.  It is all the same, as it ever was.  Just as written earlier, there is always a spiritual element in these stories, whether intended or not.  We know that in this commercial enterprise of a series they cannot and will not go full God on us with all the bells and incense, but it is apparent that the writer(s) here understands the eternal human condition.  He understands that his story is the story of humanity for all times, and that no amount of clever manipulation and technology can consciously change us.  We need, rather, something from another source that will take the best of what we have and transport this beyond and beyond, in never ending improvement.  In the old days they called that ‘going home to glory.”  In this story it may well be “going home to the “Proto Molecule,” the original force that will somehow work its way either from or through our souls into our lives, to lead us beyond our original sin of blind narcissism. 
 
Funny thing, too, that I am going blind in my mortal age, to be restored through modern technology.   Perhaps somewhere in the haze of anesthesia I will find my personal proto molecule.  If so, rest assured I will let you know.   
 
 
 
 

​ 
The title sounds a little ominous, doesn’t it?  It’s the kind of thing that tough ex-marine fathers from Texas tell their sons on their first hunting trip.  It’s the kind of thing that principles of high schools used to tell students at graduation.  It’s the kind of thing that involves my mother as well, although this is not the kind of thing that she would say.
 
The journey to this title began about ten years ago when I listened to a radio station with a Sunday morning program called Musica Antigua.  It features music primarily from Europe from the earliest period when it was first rendered into notes, or survived by being passed down, to roughly the Baroque era, which ran through the 1600’s and early 1700’s.   As most of this music, and certainly the best of it, is religious and primarily Catholic in origin, it is surprising that a radio station that loudly promotes Marxism and every fringe PC interest group should play this stuff, but apparently the intellectuals in the crowd simple cannot deny that this is the best music that the West has to offer.  It is.  And one morning my wife and I heard what I consider to be one of the best of the best, a soul- rendering choral masterpiece by Thomas Tallis called Spem in Alium.  He was the court musical genius during the reign of Elizabeth in the latter 1500’s, who was also a Catholic during the Protestant purges.  History notes that he was so wonderful that Elizabeth simply turned a blind eye even as high court officials were regularly executed for their Papist ties.  
 
I might also briefly note that the author of Fifty Shades of Gray listens to this music as he causes his sex-mates to suffer in the real world for their (I presume) mutual pleasure, which only goes to show that even the devil can recognize the work of the Holy Spirit.  Just as the aforementioned “intellectuals in the crowd” do.  Thomas might be rolling over in his grave for this if he has not already been granted his heavenly reward.
 
My mother was no sadist, and might well have been a saint, but I am no objective observer.  What she did have was a tremendous sense for art and music, and when I sent her a rather poor recording of Spem in Alium, she still was able to say, “It is music that makes me proud to be human.”  As usual with things my mother said, I would never have thought of that on my own, and as usual, she was right.  This music (get the David Wilcox version from King’s College if you are interested) not only gets to the soul, but it enlightens it, showing to us not what we think what we might be, but something much greater.  What it does no less proves to us without question that we share in our own tiny selves the unthinkable greatness of God.  Listen to this and you get an idea of what paradise is, and what we were meant to be, and still are. 
 
I for one do not allow myself to listen to it that often.  I am afraid, for one, that with such familiarity I might begin to treat it as just another bit of choral music.  But for two, it is almost unbearable to hear.  If I give it my whole intention, I cannot help but cry, in a big way.  It pulls something out of me so great that the ‘me’ I think I am really cannot contain it, like the old wine skins bursting with new wine from the parables of the Gospels.   It is, or can be, that powerful.
 
It so happened that I was in another winter funk the other morning as I brought out the bacon and eggs.  I decided to grab something like a Gregorian chant from the old CD pile to pick me up and came upon a collection of choral music that was stuffed way in the back.  The plastic package was covered in old grease, used obviously for other bacon and eggs breakfasts, but it had no recognizable number on it for me.  I put the first of two CD’s on and it played fairly typical northern European renaissance religious works.  We sat down to eat as they hummed pleasantly on.  Then came the first notes of Spem.  Oh no, I thought, I am not prepared for this, but as I went to turn it off, my wife said “no.”   So it happened that I had found our first copy, long lost, and now it was coming to bring me out of the fog of early December to a holy light.  As it played, I had to leave the room to maintain a level composure, but even from a distance I caught the traces of glory. 
 
Perhaps because of the distant listening I also caught something that I had never caught before, something that reminded me of my mother’s feelings of pride for humanity: that we were potentially so great, made as we were in the image of God, that we were not meant to be just passive witnesses to God’s glory.  We were also meant to be active in Him in this world.  In other words, with the greatness that we have been offered, it is also absolutely incumbent upon us to act in appropriate response to our gift.  The shock I felt was unnerving.  Nothing could be more humbling, and even somewhat terrifying, than to find that the price for glory was sublime duty to the will of heaven, even in the opaque world of Man.
 
We know what that duty is, too.  We know we know because of the heroes we make.  Our true heroes lend their lives in sacrifice to others, but not only to save human forms.  The hero’s sacrifice is also to bring the shining reality he sees back to the normal world.  It is the reality of eternity, the reality that brings us to tears through such works as Spem.  The hero honors glory by showing to us and himself that life is only a small thing in the shadow of heaven.  Such sacrifice, whether carried through to the death or in a long life of dedication, is the meat, the measurable substance, of holy works of art.   The one gives the encouragement for the other, while the other gives the reality to the art.  
 
The ways to become a hero are written for us in holy texts and sometimes secular works, but there is a catch: for most, these texts do not bring with them the joy and conviction necessary to strive towards perfection.  The Bible, for instance, is more a stern reprimand than an inspiration to many most of the time.  It is said – and I have experienced this – that such sacred readings can only inspire us through the gift of grace, which can be asked for but cannot be controlled through any formula. 
 
Ah, but music!   Music can move anyone in the desired direction.  How far one is moved depends upon one’s receptivity, but something almost always happens with music.  For instance, I hate nasty gangster rap “music” because I feel its violence and hatred.  If I wanted to feel it, I would feel it more intimately, but feel it I do whether I want to or not.  And so it is with sacred music.  One might reject the feeling, but it is there for the offering.  The language of music, it seems, can come pre-wrapped in grace.  In this it might well be a language akin to that of angels.   It does not bring the reason for doing this or not doing that, but it supplies the power to overcome the reluctance to follow a calling.   
 
Willingness, then, is what it ultimately gives us, whether it is an empowerment for war or for heaven.  With war, there is death, and still we march on to the pipes and drums; with heaven, there is life, but still we have difficulty.  Death is easy, it seems, compared to life, but we have been given the language of angels to help.  We can choose to listen or not, but it is there.  It is there to help us fulfill our sacred duty to compliment the spiritual gift of glory right here on earth.  It is a tremendously difficult, heroic task, but the call to duty that comes through such gifted composers as Thomas Tallis is so compelling, so beyond bounds, that we sometimes are made willing to suffer the pains of discarding our old skins to prepare for the new wine.   


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

​ 
            We know a guy who got religion a few years ago at the same church retreat where, for the first time, I dragged out my guitar to play old timey three- and- four chord religious numbers.   He wasn’t the only one.   The retreat did something for all of us, even though much of it was as cheesy as a room full of Packer’s fans.  Little did we know that this was only the honeymoon.  One older woman, for instance, was inspired to fanaticism because she began to see signs and wonders everywhere (it was she who helped me see the faces in the scroll of Isaiah in the Museum of Scrolls in Jerusalem).  She no longer does, describing herself as “dry.”  She is not bitter, as we all know God works in His own way, but she is not happy about it.  We might even say that, once the magic was taken away, she is unhappier now than before, although I don’t know that for sure.  But I do think that of this aforementioned guy.  He, too, had wonders revealed to him, which must have been marvelous until the Church revealed a wonder of its own.
 
            Divorce.  Thirty years before, he had married his current wife in a church service.  She had been married briefly before, and had gotten divorced without having children.  The cut was clean and there were no complications of any unusual sort in the next thirty years of marriage until after the retreat.  It was then that this guy found out that, because his wife had been married in a church the first time, she could not marry again in the name of the Catholic Church until she had her first marriage annulled.  She had not “gotten religion” along with him at the retreat, but put up with his first attempt at the annulment.  When that was declined, she said “never again” and left for a Protestant church.  At this time, this guy can’t take communion and is considered to be committing a mortal sin – that’s the kind that sends you to hell – every time he has sex with his wife of thirty years.  Now they seem to be having trouble with their marriage.  It might just be that the rules of the Catholic Church will cause the two to get a divorce.  Unless she then concedes to try again for an annulment with him, which is unlikely, the guy will never be able to get married again or, of course, have sex without risking eternal damnation.  
 
            It seems we are often led by a carrot and then clobbered by a stick.  For me, this poor man is suffering from the kind of legalism that poisoned the scribes and Pharisees.  It was Jesus who called them hypocrites because they only knew the law from the outside, not from the heart.  In fact, according to Christianity, many of the laws, such as those prescribing food, were put into place to condition the people for the future to do Christ’s will.  And what Christ’s will was, was that we should love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves.  Needless to say, eating shell fish was not credited as part of that. 
 
In the same vein, neither do I think the sin of this “guy” is a sin at all.  Rather, he is suffering under a law that was made to keep people from using one another as sexual playthings.  The letter of the law, if it is not pointed towards this very good end, should be meaningless, as is eating shellfish.  And yet the Church will not give in.  It is simply considered truth and that is that.  Talk about your scribes and Pharisees.
 
However, the issue at the heart of it all is sin, which certainly does exist.  As silly as it may be, sometimes we find the heart of real sin most readily in fictional movies.  I certainly think I did in the Fargo series on Netflix, made in the same spirit as the movie of the same name.   
 
It begins in Bemidji, a small town in northern Minnesota that is the only place of any size between Duluth and Fargo, North Dakota.  The series paints the people there as ludicrously stereotypical American Nordics, who face the eternally frozen world with a blank politeness that makes the rest of us laugh.  We suspect that it is too good to be real, and for Lester, the middle-aged looser who barely makes a living selling life insurance, we find this to be true.  It begins with him being pushed around by the old high school bully, against whom Lester is pathetically helpless.  He has his nose broken in the incident, and while waiting to be treated in the emergency room, meets another man who also has suffered some damage to his face.  The other man – played by a devious Billy Bob Thornton – finally gets the lowdown on what happened to Lester, then tells him that, if it were he, he would kill the bully.  Lester laughs nervously, but Billy Bob continues.  In fact, he says, I’ll do you the favor and kill the guy for you.  “Just tell me yes or no.”  Lester is confused, and as he thinks about this proposal he is asked by the nurse if he is Lester.  He says “yes.”  After treatment, he goes home to a wife who berates him for being such a looser, and who tells him flatly that she should have married the good one, his younger brother.   He has had a very bad and weird day.
 
Not long after, he finds that the bully has been murdered – stabbed in the neck while “busy” at a house of ill-repute.   He is contacted by police as a possible witness to the stranger, Billy Bob, who was known to be at the emergency room at the same time as he.  Confused and upset, he goes home to the wife, who berates him again, this time attacking him for his sexual performance.  They are in the basement trying to fix an old washing machine, and he grabs the nearest tool, a ball-peen hammer, and whacks her on the head.  She looks at him cross-eyed until blood spirits out and she falls to the floor.  For a few seconds, Lester is appalled.  Then he fully snaps, falling on her with the hammer until her head is crushed to near mush.  He has now become a murderer. 
 
His new identity is at first frightening, but as the series moves on and he gets away with things, he begins to build confidence in himself.  He feels powerful for the first time in his life.  He marries a beautiful and much younger woman, gets “salesman of the year,” a big house and, most importantly, the adulation of everyone.  He loses all sense of guilt and becomes a predator, in the mold of the assassin, Billy Bob.  For him, self-centered evil has taken over his life, and he has never been happier.  
 
That is why rules are made.  The movie makes it clear that we are all potential predators.  As the old fable tells us, we must never entertain temptation, as this is the nose of the camel in the tent that eventually will be followed by the entire camel.  The rules of the Catholic Church mean to be so unyielding that the faithful will not even entertain breaking them; and if broken, those miscreants must serve as an example to others.  The Fall of Man is real; we all are capable of evil.  Like Lester, we might not only come to act with evil intent, but come to prosper from it, and with that, come to love being evil incarnate ourselves. 
 
But I cannot forget the Pharisees.  In quiet moments of spiritual meditation, a similar picture always arises in my mind.  I have described it in these essays before; it is of a sandy beach empty of people, with a jagged cliff behind it and a still, infinite sea before it.  It speaks as the Holy Spirit, and in this, all the strife and turmoil and emotion of human life have been bypassed as so much dross.  In this, evil is envisioned as turning one’s back towards the sea and one’s face to the harsh land beyond the cliff.  In this, evil is the concern over the dross to the exclusion of the vast holiness of our eternal nature.  Evil becomes, then, exactly as we have been taught: a devouring spirit of egotism.  It might not smash a woman’s head to pulp, but it will train our sight away from the shore leading to the sea.  The moral overtones are not clear here, but the meaning is the same: we will lose God and our eternity with Him with a selfish outlook.  Here, we see religious legalism as just that: a structure built by man to facilitate the holy, but not the holy itself.  If it leads elsewhere than towards God, it proves that it has become the law of the prideful Pharisees. 
 
It is often very hard or impossible to determine the final effects of religious legalism.  Maybe, in the case of our example of the problem marriage, dissolution of that marriage or celibacy would turn out to be better for both.  Ultimately, however, it is left to the Holy Spirit to decide.  If it clearly says “eat with lepers,” then eat with lepers; and if it says “drop your nets – and your sins – and follow me,” then drop everything and walk with uncommon faith towards the sea.